A Candid Review Of The Happy MD’s “Pandemic Survival Guide for Physicians” Online Course

Dike Drummond, a.k.a. The Happy MD, is a Mayo-trained family physician whose personal struggle with burnout led him to leave clinical medicine in 2011 and instead pursue physician coaching and burnout prevention as his full-time vocation.

Let's go beyond the obvious punchline (Are you saying that to become happy, he had to leave medicine?) and try to get at the substance of his experience. He has learned (and, importantly, learned to teach others) the skills physicians are traditionally poorest at putting into practice: Self-care, establishing boundaries, and articulating values and identity that exist beyond the practice of medicine.

I've been aware of Dike, his blog, and his cadre of burnt-out-docs repurposed to become physician coaches but have never had deep or sustained interaction with him. Some of his concepts have trickled down to me via other bloggers, for example, his Venn diagram illustrating the overlap between the life you lead and the life you want.

In this way, I've know him from afar as someone able to use simple models for deeper effect. Dike reached out to me and asked me to review a new course he was assembling, the Pandemic Survival Guide for Physicians.

He granted me access to the course as part of an offer to be an affiliate - I'd make a small commission for all referrals to his course that ended up in a purchase - so please be aware of this conflict of interest as you read my assessment below.

Lots of people offer to pay me to review or promote their products, and I'd estimate turn down ~ 95%. I decided to try Dike's course because he's been in the burnout coaching space for a decade, and I was curious to understand insights gleaned over such a long time. I also thought it was clever to market a pandemic-specific course, and wanted to see how well he could integrate a global health crisis with the theme of burnout.

The price is right at $97.00 - I suspect he is keeping the price low because he knows a portion of those who enroll will be drawn to his coaching services.

How can you be sure this isn't a scheme to part you from your rapidly vanishing money? Dike offers a money-back guarantee where you have 90 days to request a full refund, no questions asked. The man is confident he'll deliver value.

The structure is a series of videos narrated by Dike, using simple drawn diagrams to emphasize specific strategies and concepts. Dike is a charismatic, sincere and talented communicator.

Each video is followed by an exercise where the lessons he's just discussed are complemented by individual questions. Some are posed in the form of solitary writing exercises. Others are intended to be explored with family or professional colleagues.

The overall sense is a fireside chat with a trusted senior colleague who is confiding his secrets to longevity in times of uncertainty. (The cozy vibe is not just figurative, but literal - the videos are filmed in front of his fireplace.)

Dike begins by emphasizing how to acknowledge and step outside the narrow, short-term perspective we typically allow to engage our complete attention when analyzing why we are unhappy in our careers.

Next, he outlines the added volatility that has been introduced into both our personal and professional lives with the COVID pandemic, and the far-reaching consequences that this volatility will have on our present and future.

Dike is most powerful in providing a specific and actionable template to change behavior and hold yourself accountable. He designs the template to work at multiple levels - personal, familial and professional.

He also adds a lesson to help you explore potential career pivots, tapping your network to determine goodness-of-fit for a new gig, and accessing different strategies that help you recognize how your core values can mesh with a change in your practice of medicine.

The strengths of the course are several:

1. It is helpful in re-framing problems with a shifted perspective that allows you to extract the most valuable lessons from what you formerly regarded as failures.
2. It provides a framework for evaluating and reinforcing commitments that support core values while eliminating those activities that are depleting or may otherwise accelerate burnout.
3. It is designed for continual self-reflection, with a strong bias toward journaling and creating a regular habit of writing to achieve insight. If you kept diaries as a kid and writing is your favored form of self-expression, this is an ideal course for you.
4. It is geared to develop a cyclical, ongoing practice of course-correction resulting in incremental change.
5. This is a safe, low cost introduction for someone who is flirting with an executive or physician coaching service and is curious what type of counsel such a service will offer. The concepts of absorbing and articulating lessons learned from both failure and success, and of holding yourself accountable for implementing change based on these lessons offer valuable glimpses into the world of coaching services.
6. Those folks who derive value from motivational speakers are likely to appreciate this mode of learning.

Not every student will be a perfect fit for this course:

1. Simplicity cuts both ways. A concept can be easy to grasp, and can reveal deeper levels when explored fully by the individual. At the same time, a subset of students might regard simplicity as insufficient. Simplicity is a style of teaching that not every learner will appreciate, including a subset of those who thrive on complexity in medicine.
2. There is a heavy emphasis on journaling as a path to continually cultivating insight. If you are not accustomed to expressing yourself in writing, you may get less out of this course.
3. This is a burnout strategy course adapted to fit our new COVID world - an outline for dealing with uncertainty in career superimposed on uncertainty from a pandemic. If your primary motivation is to position yourself to specfically respond to COVID, you will find useful big picture tools, but may get less out of the course than someone also struggling with burnout.
4. There is a spiritual dimension to the instruction, with an eye toward mindfulness. That might not be your cup of tea.

Dike is a talented teacher with a decade of experience and thousands of hours of one-on-one physician coaching under his belt. He knows what works, can break it down into achievable steps, and has inhabited this space about as long as it has existed.

If you were already burnt out, and COVID led you to freak out, the Pandemic Survival Guide for Physicians might be the resource that you've been hoping for.

If you are considering purchasing the course, and found this review useful, I'd be grateful if you'd use my affiliate link.